Hedge 246: Complexity and Deployment
In this roundtable episode of the Hedge, Tom, Eyvonne, and Russ discuss complexity and deployment. Why do some protocols fail to deploy, or require decades, while others deploy quickly?
TNO005: Making Networking Cool Again with Meter (Sponsored)
Meter CEO Anil Varanasi joins Scott Robohn on this sponsored episode of Total Network Operations to talk about Meter’s vision for networking and network operations. In this podcast, recorded the day before Meter’s first public MeterUp event, Anil and Scott discuss Meter’s approach to building new networking equipment, vertical integration of their hardware and software,... Read more »Packet Pushers: Chat with Eric Chou
A while ago, Eric Chou invited me to a friendly chat in his Network Automation Nerds podcast.
The episode was published a few days ago; I hope you’ll enjoy listening to it.
Memos – Amazing Open Source, Self-hosted Notes App
I've tried many note-taking apps like Evernote, OneNote, and Apple Notes, but none really satisfied me, if I'm being honest. I've always wanted something simple, without any over-complication, and either free or cost-effective. Although, I have to admit, at the moment, I'm using an app called 'Bear Notes,' which costs around £2 per month, and I love the app. It's so minimalist and very user-friendly, but it doesn't have a web GUI or an app for Windows. I'm an Apple user, so it's not a big issue.
That being said, I recently stumbled upon another great self-hosted note-taking app called 'Memos' I just couldn't believe that I didn't know about this until very recently. It's so minimalist and has a Twitter-like feed where you can just chuck on any note, links, or even attachments.
Memos Installation
If you already have Docker installed, the installation will take just a few seconds. You can use either docker run or docker-compose.
docker run -d \
--init \
--name memos \
--publish 5230:5230 \
--volume ~/.memos/:/var/opt/memos \
neosmemo/memos:stableservices:
memos:
image: neosmemo/memos:stable
container_name: memos
volumes:
- ~/.memos/:/var/opt/memos
ports:
- 5230:5230In the Docker configuration for Continue reading
TL005: Navigating the Practical and Emotional Challenges of Tech Layoffs
Layoffs are a sensitive topic in the tech industry. Host Laura Santamaria discusses the emotional and practical impacts on employees and leaders. She also covers the signs of potential layoffs, and strategies for job searching post-layoff while maintaining perspective. She concludes with a tips for leaders to more effectively lead their teams through a layoff.... Read more »CJ Desai: Why I joined Cloudflare as President of Product and Engineering
I am thrilled to embark on this journey to run Product and Engineering at Cloudflare, driving forward the mission of helping build a better Internet.
While I was a graduate student at University of Illinois, the university introduced the Mosaic web browser to students. In addition to being super easy to install and use, it displayed pictures next to text for the first time. This may not seem impressive today, but back then it felt like a magical step forward.
This simple but powerful upgrade opened up the once niche user base from academics to the masses, transforming the world wide web to become an Internet phenomenon. Since then, I’ve always sought to be part of teams that worked on transformational technologies, including Software-as-a-Service, cloud computing, and AI. Innovation is the life blood of every technology company. To this day, I’m inspired by building products and technology that get adopted at mass scale.
The world is in a very interesting moment for technological innovation: the AI landscape is uncharted and developing at an exponential rate; the urgency for enterprises to reduce tech debt and reliance on legacy applications is at an all Continue reading
What’s new in Cloudflare One: Digital Experience (DEX) monitoring notifications and seamless access to Cloudflare Gateway with China Express
At Cloudflare, we are constantly innovating and launching new features and capabilities across our product portfolio. We are introducing roundup blog posts to ensure that you never miss the latest updates across our platform. In this post, we are excited to share two new ways that our customers can continue to keep their web properties performant and secure with Cloudflare One: new Digital Experience Monitoring (DEX) notifications help proactively identify issues that can affect the end-user digital experience, and integration with China Express enables secure access to China-hosted sites for Cloudflare Gateway customers.
As with other notification types, DEX notifications can be configured and reviewed from Cloudflare dashboard notifications.
DEX notifications address the challenge of proactively identifying issues affecting the digital experience of your end users. By monitoring device health and conducting synthetic tests from WARP clients deployed on your fleet's end-user devices, DEX provides valuable insights. These notifications empower IT administrators to quickly identify and address connectivity and application performance problems before they impact a wide range of users.
By proactively notifying administrators when problems arise, DEX helps minimize user disruption and provides Continue reading
CJ Desai: Why I joined Cloudflare as President of Product and Engineering
I am thrilled to embark on this journey to run Product and Engineering at Cloudflare, driving forward the mission of helping build a better Internet.
While I was a graduate student at University of Illinois, the university introduced the Mosaic web browser to students. In addition to being super easy to install and use, it displayed pictures next to text for the first time. This may not seem impressive today, but back then it felt like a magical step forward.
This simple but powerful upgrade opened up the once niche user base from academics to the masses, transforming the world wide web to become an Internet phenomenon. Since then, I’ve always sought to be part of teams that worked on transformational technologies, including Software-as-a-Service, cloud computing, and AI. Innovation is the life blood of every technology company. To this day, I’m inspired by building products and technology that get adopted at mass scale.
The world is in a very interesting moment for technological innovation: the AI landscape is uncharted and developing at an exponential rate; the urgency for enterprises to reduce tech debt and reliance on legacy applications is at an all time Continue reading
IS-IS Labs: Explore IS-IS Data Structures
In the first exercise in the IS-IS labs series, you configured IS-IS routing for IPv4. Before moving on to more complex topics, let’s explore the data structures IS-IS created to represent your network.
Setting up Active Directory for ISE Lab
A key component of an ISE home lab is having Active Directory installed. In this post I’ll go through setting up basic AD for use with ISE. This post is not going to cover licensing. I’m assuming you are running the eval version, which is good for 180 days, or that you already have a valid license.
My server is running in an ESX environment based on the following specs:
- OS – Windows Server 2022
- CPU – 4 vCPU
- RAM – 16 GB
- Disk – 90 GB
I’m using more than the minimum requirements. Spec it as you like based on what capacity you have available.
The first step is installing the OS. This part is easy and pretty much only requires you to set an Administrator password.
When the server has booted, start by changing the name of the server. It’s better to do this before changing any roles. Go to System Settings -> Computer Name and click Change… Set the desired name. I’m using the name dc01 in my lab. Click OK.
Changing the name is going to trigger a restart. Choose Restart Now.
From Server Manager, click Add roles and features. Click Next until you get to Continue reading
What’s new in Cloudflare One: Digital Experience (DEX) monitoring notifications and seamless access to Cloudflare Gateway with China Express
At Cloudflare, we are constantly innovating and launching new features and capabilities across our product portfolio. We are introducing roundup blog posts to ensure that you never miss the latest updates across our platform. In this post, we are excited to share two new ways that our customers can continue to keep their web properties performant and secure with Cloudflare One: new Digital Experience Monitoring (DEX) notifications help proactively identify issues that can affect the end-user digital experience, and integration with China Express enables secure access to China-hosted sites for Cloudflare Gateway customers.
Digital Experience Monitoring (DEX) offers device, application, and network performance monitoring, providing IT administrators with insights to quickly identify and resolve issues. With DEX notifications , account administrators can create configurable alert rules based on available algorithms (z-score, SLO) and existing DEX filters. When notification criteria are satisfied, customers are notified via email, Pagerduty, or Webhooks
As with other notification types, DEX notifications can be configured and reviewed from Cloudflare dashboard notifications.
DEX notifications address the challenge of proactively identifying issues affecting the digital experience of your end users. Continue reading
NAN075: Mastering Networking in the Age of AI: Advice for Aspiring Engineers
Ivan Pepelnjak joins host Eric Chou to reflect on his extensive career, his decision to reduce his content creation, and offer advice for young engineers. They discuss the evolution of networking technologies, emphasizing the importance of mastering Linux and obtaining relevant certifications. Ivan highlights the significance of creating professional visibility and owning one’s content. The... Read more »Improving platform resilience at Cloudflare through automation
Failure is an expected state in production systems, and no predictable failure of either software or hardware components should result in a negative experience for users. The exact failure mode may vary, but certain remediation steps must be taken after detection. A common example is when an error occurs on a server, rendering it unfit for production workloads, and requiring action to recover.
When operating at Cloudflare’s scale, it is important to ensure that our platform is able to recover from faults seamlessly. It can be tempting to rely on the expertise of world-class engineers to remediate these faults, but this would be manual, repetitive, unlikely to produce enduring value, and not scaling. In one word: toil; not a viable solution at our scale and rate of growth.
In this post we discuss how we built the foundations to enable a more scalable future, and what problems it has immediately allowed us to solve.
The Cloudflare Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team builds and manages the platform that helps product teams deliver our extensive suite of offerings to customers. One important component of this platform is the collection of servers that power critical products such as Durable Objects, Workers, Continue reading
Cisco U – Rev Up to Recert: Programming for Network Engineer
I just completed the Programming for Network Engineers (PRNE) learning path training on Cisco U and would like to share this with you: For a limited time, you have FREE…
The post Cisco U – Rev Up to Recert: Programming for Network Engineer appeared first on AboutNetworks.net.
Building an ISE Homelab
One of the best ways of learning something is building a lab for it. Especially when it comes to complex topics like network authentication. When I started learning about network authentication and Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE), I found that there wasn’t a lot of clear information on how you build a lab. Not in Cisco documentation and also not on blogs, etc. In this post I’ll explain how I built my lab using CML and ESX.
Having a lab with ISE only is not going to get you very far. At a minimum, I think the following devices are needed in a network authentication lab:
- Cisco ISE.
- Active Directory Domain Services.
- Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) such as Active Directory Certificate Services (ADCS).
- Network Authentication Device (NAD) such as Catalyst 9000.
For my lab, I’m using only virtual devices. The focus is on learning network authentication and ISE which is why I’ve setup a very simple PKI, ignoring best practices such as offline root, intermediate CA, and so on. I might lab that at a later stage, but that’s not the current focus.
The topology of my lab is shown below:
Note that some VMs such as the virtual Catalyst Continue reading
Reclaiming Disk Space from Old Windows Install
This is a quick post to describe how to reclaim disk space being used by an old Windows install. Recently, I upgraded to Windows 11 from Windows 10. I noticed that I was starting to run a bit low on disk space on my SSD. I have a 512 GB SSD and had less than 100 GB available:
I noticed that there is a folder named Windows.old that is 40 GB in size:
The instructions to reclaim the space seemed clear. Go to Settings -> System -> Storage and reclaim the space labeled as Previous Windows installation. However, ther was no such category when I tried:
After some searching and a little bit of thinking, I realized that this is probably a privileges problem. I became local admin by using the PAM tool. Then I ran the disk cleanup util as administrator:
I can now see that there are previous Windows installations:
I select to delete Previous Windows installations:
You have to confirm that it’s OK to delete:
The deletion process starts:
This will take some time…
There is now more space available:
If you’re running low on disk, check if you have previous Windows installations that you can Continue reading
The Size of Packets
We’ve now been running packet-switched networks for many decades, and these days it’s packets and not virtual circuits lie behind most of the world’s digital communications service. But some very fundamental questions remain unanswered in this packet-switched world. Perhaps the most basic question is: “How big should a packet be?” And, surprisingly enough, there is no clear answer!PP034: Driving Security and Network Assurance with Juniper Networks (Sponsored)
Today on the Packet Protector podcast we talk with sponsor Juniper Networks about how to simplify the complexity that affects network and cybersecurity teams alike. From tool sprawl to floods of data, complexity bedevils operations and troubleshooting. We talk about what Juniper brings to the table for networking and security professionals to help them do... Read more »HS085: The Perfect and the Good (Enough)
Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good… it’s a challenge that architects and strategists often face. They may design a “perfect” architecture or strategy, only to see it overwhelmed by the realities of implementation. John Burke and Johna Johnson discuss the questions to ask to ensure that devotion to the perfect doesn’t... Read more »
Leveraging Kubernetes virtual machines at Cloudflare with KubeVirt
Cloudflare runs several multi-tenant Kubernetes clusters across our core data centers. These general-purpose clusters run on bare metal and power our control plane, analytics, and various engineering tools such as build infrastructure and continuous integration.
Kubernetes is a container orchestration platform. It enables software engineers to deploy containerized applications to a cluster of machines. This enables teams to build highly-available software on a scalable and resilient platform.
In this blog post we discuss our Kubernetes architecture, why we needed virtualization, and how we’re using it today.
Multi-tenancy is a concept where one system can share its resources among a wide range of customers. This model allows us to build and manage a small number of general purpose Kubernetes clusters for our internal application teams. Keeping the number of clusters small reduces our operational toil. This model shrinks costs and increases computational efficiency by sharing hardware. Multi-tenancy also allows us to scale more efficiently. Scaling is done at either a cluster or application level. Cluster operators scale the platform by adding more hardware. Teams scale their applications by updating their Kubernetes manifests. They can scale vertically by increasing their resource requests or horizontally by increasing the number of Continue reading